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Monday

1 May 2006

Icon Game

They’re at it again.

For a party that has displayed such open contempt for Britain and her institutions, New Labour simply cannot keep away from what it means to be British or, in its most recent incarnation, English.  Back in 1997 we had Tony Blair’s version of the Year Zero when all history was supposed to revert to factory settings so the Prime Minister would have a blank slate where Great Britain used to be.  Then it was Cool Britannia, which was supposed to swap a nation for a marketing scheme.  This was followed on by the late Robin Cook claiming that the British did not exist (and the English least of all) and that if anything was supposed to define this mythical people, it was a fondness for chicken tikka masala. 

Now it’s “Icons: a Portrait of Britain”: a government backed project to figure out who these odd, exotic things called Englishpersons (no Englishmen allowed in the Blair New World, sorry) are. 

The idea behind this wheeze is to find what the “icons" (a very un-English word) of Englishness are by means of an online nomination and voting process that is so open to manipulation that it has managed democracy written all over it—and no doubt it is very well managed indeed, as Mr. Blair probably does not want a repeat of the last time direct democracy was tried.  Remember back in 2004 when Radio 4 ran its “listener’s law" wheeze where the audience was invited to pick a bit of legislation for Stephen pound MP to introduce in the House of Commons.  Instead of going in for a ban on smoking, compulsory organ donation, or mandatory voting the Proles went and asked to be allowed to defend their homes against intruders with “any means necessary.”  The right Hon Stephen pound then replied that the result was a "ludicrous, brutal, unworkable blood-stained piece of legislation.  I can't remember who it was who said, `The people have spoken, the bastards'."

The actual winners, if such they are, are interesting in that they are pretty much what the BBC features department would have chosen if it were up to them.  Up near the top of the list are such multiculti favourites as the Notting Hill Carnival and Brick Lane; the usual suspects such as Big Ben, pubs, cricket,  and Morris dancing as a bromide; transient oddities like the miniskirt; and head-scratchers like Hadrian’s Wall, the Eden Project, and Darwin’s Origins of Species.   In all, there are twenty one “icons” Why twenty one?  Why not twenty, twenty five, or even a manageable ten?  Only the Icon people can answer that mystery.  For our part, we are content to offer the official list of “icons” followed by our modest suggestions.  Some of ours were nominated, others weren’t, and some don’t even exist any more.  And my favourite nominee is most conspicuous by its absence: the quintessence of Englishness is a refusal to start silly polls to find ridiculous “icons” of Englishness.

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Tuesday

2 May 2006

Bandwidth Blues

Running a web site is like tending an over-achieving bonsai: Turn your back for five minutes and you’ve got a redwood.  It’s also like a shark, if I may mix my metaphors; if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies. 

That’s what it’s been like for me since davidszondy.com was officially launched in January 2004.  I’d originally planned for it to be a very small site of about a hundred pages that would take five weeks to build and which I’d add to every month or so. Instead, it’s a giant of a site that I tend to every day and for Tales of Future Past alone I still have enough material to add to keep me busy for the next two years.  Ephemeral Isle was originally a place for occasional miscellanea, but has become a daily column averaging over 800 words a day, five days a week and has spawned a spin-off section, Pulp Parade.  And, of course, there have been the increasingly popular Radio Plays section that I never imagined would be so large and, not least, the annual short story contests now in their third year.

Of course, none of this would be worth a fig if it weren’t for the enthusiastic support of our visitors.  It’s their showing up to read these weird ramblings that makes it worthwhile and knowing that the hard work is appreciated that keeps it from getting boring.  Our numbers aren’t making the BBC or Instapundit lose any sleep, but we have a very healthy daily traffic and the feedback from our visitors has been very encouraging—not to mention voluminous, if the e-mail backlog is anything to judge by (I promise I will answer all of you.  Really!).

Trouble is, success can often be its own punishment.  This site is not only large; it also uses a lot of graphics and audio files, which takes up both a lot of storage space and a lot of bandwidth.  It’s the sort of situation that makes one dread achievement as much as failure.  It’s really great to see the site get bigger and bigger and to see the statistics showing that visitors want more of this or that feature, but it’s also dismaying to see the storage space on the server shrink by the day as more content is added.  Having a good day when the visitor numbers start to spike at ten times the average traffic is a real ego stroking, but that soon turns to anxiety as the bandwidth allocation is gobbled up and the prospect of having the site suddenly going down looms large.   It’s one of the catch 22s of the Web.  In order to be more successful, the site needs to keep growing and attracting more visitors, but growth means stretching resources to the limits.

Unfortunately, that’s where davidszondy.com is at the moment.  If you’re a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that new sections aren’t being added to Tales of Future Past has often as they once were.  And you may have noticed that Pulp Parade hasn’t expanded since it was first put up.  The reason for this is very simple.  We’re starting to run out of space on the server.  We need to expand and that costs money, which is a bit tight at the moment.

There are ways around this.  At the moment, part of the site’s operating costs are partly covered by advertising revenues and sales from our shop, but that’s only partly, and to increase advertising and shop revenue means increasing our traffic—which is great, but also means eating up bandwidth and paying for that can wipe out revenue increases.  It’s the law of diminishing returns unless we get quantum leaps in visitorship and start commanding better than bargain basement advertising rates. 

So, davidszondy.com is coming up with new ways to raise money to keep going and growing.  One of them is that we’re revamping the shop.  Until now, we’ve relied on our stock sold through cafepress, but this week we’ve installed a PayPal shopping cart and in the months to come we’ll be selling merchandise directly to our visitors that’s something different from the usual tee shirts and coffee mugs. 

The other is that we’ve come up with a way to say thank you to those of you who donate so generously to our bandwidth fund, because it is only through the help of our visitors that davidszondy.com comes close to breaking even and why I’m not nicking lead off the church roof to keep things going. 

If you’ve been enjoying the science fiction adventures in the Radio Plays section, you’re probably one of those who wished that they could download them to your ipod or whatever rather than being tied to a streaming audio feed.  Because of bandwidth issues, we haven’t been able to offer downloading, but now, as a premium for donating $25.00 or more to the Tales of Future Past Bandwidth Fund, you can have all of our radio offerings, dozens of extra plays, plus a bonus audio feature—all in glorious MP3 formatting. 

So, if you’ve enjoyed Tales of Future Past, Pulp Parade, Radio Plays, or (if you’re an obsessive compulsive masochist) Ephemeral Isle, then help out by visiting the new Donate page or just clicking the PayPal donate button here on Ephemeral Isle.

Because nothing stinks worse than a dead redwood shark.

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Wednesday

3 May 2006

Stealth Veggies

Have you ever spent thirty minutes trying to persuade someone to swallow a mouthful of broccoli?  If you haven’t, then you are not a parent.

My daughter is one of the fussier eaters on the face of the Earth.  Bear in mind that when I say this, I am not restricting myself to the human race.  There may be humming birds and certain varieties of fleas that are more restrictive in their tastes, but it would take a pretty damn picky aardvark turning down its plate of ants to beat my Emma.

Part of this is a matter of circumstances.  When Emma was born she suffered from all manner of skin rashes, which were put down to baby eczema and infant’s cap (whatever that is) and nothing we tried would clear up her condition.  When she grew large enough to start taking semi-solid foods (or “messes,” as my aunt used to call them), our doctor decided that it was time we started to put some meat on Emma’s infant bones and suggested that we start feeding her oatmeal and yogurt, and then progress on to the odd scrambled egg.  This lasted until the first and only time we tried out the yogurt.  After two spoonfuls, Emma suddenly started to develop large welts and inside of fifteen minutes she was red as a lobster and having trouble breathing.  A quick run to the casualty ward, a longish stay in hospital, and a follow up test at an allergy clinic revealed that our daughter was deathly allergic to (among other things) oatmeal, milk, and eggs.

Emma’s allergies eventually got better and the rashes vanished as she grew from toddler to kidhood, but milk and eggs are still on the same page as strychnine her, and you never realise at how many things have dairy products and cackle berries in them until you start reading the labels.  And I’m not talking obvious things like biscuits and cakes.  We once had to have a Washington State ferry turned around and put into Friday Harbour because we discovered too late that the hotdogs served aboard used milk as filler.  And restaurants?  Everything on the kid’s menu has cheese on it.  A choice between grilled cheese, cheesy fries, cheese pizza, cheeseburgers, and cheese sticks?  Good grief!  Why not just call it the “kid’s death menu” and be done with it!

Needless to say, eating out generally restricted the menu to French fries and diet cola with ketchup adding substantial nutrition.  Sometimes, at a trusted eatery, we could expand things with fish fingers and chicken nuggets (and these only if they are in the shape of dinosaurs, so Emma can be persuaded to bite their heads off before they “get her.”), but the damage had already been done.  As an infant’s distrust of any new foods kicked in, meat and veg went the way of all yogurts and our daughter became a dedicated carb fiend for whom all that was not starchy was alien and suspect.    

This has meant some alteration in our meals.  There was a time, long ago when the world was young, when sitting down to supper meant exactly that: sitting down.  I would put my legs under a table to a plate of chops or a steak, which would be flanked by steaming potatoes and a mound of peas— both glistening with melted butter and accented by a sprinkling of parsley flakes.  Today, every meal is basically a picnic centred on the living room ottoman where various finger foods, such as pigs in a blanket or hummus and toasted flat bread, is accompanied by a platter of raw vegetables.  It’s never very satisfying, as I generally dislike foods that aren’t meant to bow to knife and fork.  The meat is invariably some sort of greasy sausage or beef burger and the raw vegetables foreshadow some serious time in the karzi, but it’s the only way my wife and I can get a spot of nourishment for ourselves while coaxing our progeny to get some vitamins down her gullet.  The evening repast is less a way for the family to come together and more of a prolonged episode of games, stratagems, cajoling, entreaties, demands, bribes, and threats aimed at keeping Emma from ending up in the local newspapers as the first case of infant scurvy in living memory. 

In all, we’ve had fifty percent success.  Emma will now at least taste meat on occasion, so she’s not getting her protein entirely from soy milk (and before you ask, she’s allergic to nuts, so we’re one of those families who contribute to the peanut-free zone paranoia that is all the rage.), and we are getting her to put things like carrots and broccoli into her dinner hole.  We can even, with persistence, get her to chew them.  However, we are having a hell of a time getting her to cross the Rubicon of swallowing.  Instead, she will simply shoves one well-masticated cud after the other into her cheeks until she looks as if she has an advanced case of mumps.  Having no desire to be the parents of some sort of weresquirrel, my wife and I now must take it in turns checking to see if the previous consignment has been sent stomachward before we press the next upon Emma.  This is so daunting and, frankly, disgusting a task that, we are falling back on the old Navajo Indian trick of pureeing her broccoli in the blender and then mixing it in her soy ice cream.  It’ll never top the best seller list at Ben and Jerry’s (the dark green colour flecked with broccoli blossoms will see to that), but Emma seems perfectly happy to eat it—and swallow it, so there’s no accounting for taste. 

Yes, it is cowardly and we still have to battle our daughter’s pickiness, but at least she won’t starve to death or contract beri beri in the meantime.

Low cunning: the parent’s best friend.

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Thursday

4 May 2006

Lost in Translation

I’m the demographic that the makers of Lost hate.  As I said last week, I never watch network television voluntarily, I despise soap operas, I’m a firm believer in solid dramatic structures with linear plots focused on a main character, and I’ve spent enough time in the wilder parts of the tropics to know that a beach is the worst place to try to live unless the combination of sand, seaweed, blazing sun, and exposure to wind and waves makes you really want to imitate an order of Oysters Rockefeller caught in a dishwasher. 

Lost has its audience—a massive one, in fact—which it includes my wife, who can’t go without her weekly Lost fix.  However, its attractions are entirely lost on me.  Maybe the allure is missing because I’ve actually been shipwrecked on a tropical island and for me the setting of the show translates not into romance, but into memories of sweat, bugs, and trying to patch a ruptured diesel tank while wearing scuba gear.  

Mind you, if it had been set in Blackpool, I’d still have given it a miss.  I knew it would be dire the moment the word “ensemble” reared its hydra-like head.  In theatre, an ensemble refers to a tight-knit group of actors who can work together like a well-drilled commando team.  Television does not understand this.  There is a famous case of a television producer asking a Shakespearean director rhetorically how long it takes create an ensemble.  Without missing a beat, the director said “four years.”  In television, ensemble is a warning that there won’t be a main character and plot lines will be doled out to the supporting cast as an entitlement as the editing hops from story to story without giving a tinker’s damn about coherency.

The format of Lost  is essentially that of a soap opera.  Where other programmes might have self-contained episodes, a series arc, or (in rare cases like Babylon 5) a fully plotted story line from first episode to last, a soap is actually hostile to plot resolutions.  Plots in soaps are not intended to lead to a climax and a conclusion, they are meant to generate more plots.  A soap plotline is milked until it produces no further incidents, and then it is quietly sidelined and forgotten.  Rarely, if ever, does it result in the loose threads being tied up and The End stuck on the credits.

This is patently the case with Lost.  The purpose of all these riddles and mysteries is not to build to a logical dramatic conclusion, but rather to string the viewers along while giving the writers limitless grist for their story mill—at least, until the audience twigs and goes elsewhere in disgust.  It’s not in any way a new idea.  Television has been using this wheeze in prime time ever since Dallas and Eastenders topped the ratings back in the ‘80s.  Lost is in good company here.  As with The X Files or, more recently, Alias the details of all the mysteries are of no interest to me.  I’ve been lead down that garden path too many times by writers who, by series three, make it quite clear to all and sundry that they never had any real idea what was going on either.  Nearly every “revelation” leads nowhere and since soap operas can only work if everyone has the maturity of an underdeveloped twelve-year old who is half-detached from reality, the “ensemble” of characters are as engaging as a bus schedule.  On Lost, this particularly exercises no one.  In fact, no one gets worked up by much of anything except personal issues, despite the fact that they’ve had to deal with bizarre conspiracies, hostile strangers, child kidnappings, invisible monsters, and the odd polar bear.  There have probably been more goings on, but I’ve only seen three episodes through.

What I find particularly aggravating about this show is that the writers never bothered to actually set up the conditions for the story properly, nor have they moved things forward one iota.  The pilot began with a load of people milling about on a beach and not having much of anything to do with one another.  Two seasons later, we still have a load of people milling around a beach and having not much of anything to do with one another.  This is not surprising, as real plot development means narrowing the story to a point where the climax occurs and reducing plot choices is not what soaps are about. 

The trouble is, this necessity only gives the impression that these castaways are utterly useless at the Robinson Crusoe game.  The first season covered the first 44 days after the crash.  It’s a wonder everyone wasn’t stone dead by day 21.  It’s clear from the plots that neither characters nor writers has any understanding whatsoever of what it means to be stranded by an air crash on a tropical island.  The castaways lack even the most primitive of organisation, can’t put up a decent lean-to, still seem to think that fire comes out of a pipe in the wall and food in shrink-wrapped packages.  They also haven’t the slightest notion of priorities.  Despite suffering murderous attacks and kidnappings of children, the castaways have yet to even bother to mount anything resembling a defence, post guards, or deploy scouts.  They apparently can’t even organise a work party to dig latrines so that nobody dies of dysentery.  Hell, they can’t even deal with good luck when it falls in their laps.  They find the fuselage of the aircraft, but never bother to look for the half-dozen or so EPIRB beacons that must have been aboard, they find a fully functioning bunker/habitat full of gear and with what seems an automated electrical power plant and don’t immediately make it the focus of a settlement, they find a cache of arms and almost immediately let a con artist steal them (yet they don't pummel him to find out where he's hidden them, despite the fact that their lives depend on it), they find DYNAMITE (!) and fail to realise its potential, and when the fat comic relief, in a bizarre act of self-fulfilment, dumps out his entire stash of tinned food so he won’t gain anymore weight, no one tries to wring his neck for wasting valuable food.  Had this series been made in the ‘60s, there would have been a leader of the group and a signal fire by the end of episode one, the bunker would have been found by episode two, opened in three, the whole area cleared of trees by four, polar bear steaks by five, a stockade built by seven, and an armed search party grimly combing the forest for the “others” as soon as the men had a spot of target practice and figured out how to make dynamite grenades.  By the time a rescue party found them, the castaways would have been petitioning for statehood.

Speaking of the fat comic relief chap, save for him, the flight seems to have been a charter for a fashion model convention and they must have salvaged an entire beauty spa and laundry from the wreckage, as everyone always looks as fresh as a daisy and their clothes have a crispness that you just can’t get from washing on a rock in a stream.  I know— I’ve had to do it. 

This is not the first island castaway drama in television history.  To my recollection, there have been three others—four, if you count Gilligan’s Island.  In 1969, we had Rod Serling's New People, which was about a plane full of young people stranded on an island that had an entire town built on it for an atomic bomb test that never happened.  Without hope of rescue, the castaways decided to build a new, totally relevant, hip, and with-it society with out hang-ups, man.  In 1992, we had Danger Island, which was a pilot for a never produced series about castaways on a tropical island who find a decades-old underground bunker from the ‘70s and weird mysteries in the jungle involving genetic experiments.  Hang on…

But the best was 1969’s Lost Flight.  Also a failed pilot, this too was about survivors from an air crash on a tropical island without hope of rescue, but unlike Lost, it was actually about adults who’d read the Boy Scout manual and was written by people who understood drama.  It focused on Steve Bannerman (Lloyd Bridges), the captain of the plane (See?  A main character.  Already it’s more interesting) and his efforts to keep the panicky castaways from disintegrating into something out of Lord of the Flies.  And it actually has realistic dialogue rather than new-age musings and screaming rows on sandy beaches, such as this exchange where Captain Bannerman explains why he is in charge.

Glenn Wallup: I don't remember you being elected king of this island.

Steve Bannerman: There's no election necessary, Mr Wallup.  As senior officer of that aircraft I'm responsible for the safety and well being of every person on this island.  In plain English - I am in charge here.  That's not my idea; it's maritime law.  Now maybe you don't like it, maybe I don't - that's the way it's going to have to be.  Now is that absolutely clear?

Some how, I couldn’t see anyone on Lost quoting maritime law.  That’s far too Guy Williams, don’t you know. 

Okay, so I’m a curmudgeon who is so contrary that he can’t stand Lost.  So, why do I bring all this up?  Very simple; it’s because I have an obligation to my readers.  Despite my distaste for the show, Ephemeral Isle has great news for every rabid Lost fan.  You don't have to endure another three years of maddening riddles.  I can now state that EI has, with great difficulty, cracked the mystery of the show.  We have the exclusive story on the finale episode and the startling revelation that it contains.  Here is the key.  Here, for the first time, we shall reveal to the world the face of the person who is behind it all.  Here is the one who caused the plane crash, built the bunkers, runs the Others, created the monsters, and air dropped all those boxes of cereal in the jungle with those I Ching symbols on the packetss.  The master of the Island of the Lost is…

"Same thing we do every night, Pinky...:

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Friday

5 May 2006

The Prisoner

I am not a number, I am a free man!

Going from the ridiculous to the sublime, Sky television has announced that it is undertaking a six-episode remake of the classic ‘60s programme, The Prisoner.  According to news reports, Christopher Eccleston is rumoured to be taking over the role of No. 6 from Patrick McGoohan.

If you’ve never seen The Prisoner, then you’ve lived a sad, deprived life, as it is arguably the best television series ever made.  Being about a secret agent who resigns from his job only to find himself gassed and carried off to a strange, Kafkaesque place called the Village that is really some sort of interrogation centre/social engineering laboratory run by an unknown power and guarded by strangely alive robot balloons, it is, admittedly, not suited for casual viewing. 

On one level it can be seen as an espionage adventure with sci-fi overtones, but it is also filled to the brim with allegories about society and individual freedom, as well as strange goings on, such as aptitude tests where square holes suddenly change to accommodate round pegs, that make it clear that the Village is a place where reality starts to melt away at the edges.  Where modern fantasy series like Lost dole out pointless riddles without answers, The Prisoner dealt in allegories wrapped in enigmas.  Many of the questions raised by the series had no answers, because that was the point.  For example, we never learn why No. 6 resigned.  This is because the question was deliberately perverse. As the hero, we were expected to root for No. 6.  We wanted him to defeat the Village and keep his secrets.  Yet, because of our curiosity, we want to know why he resigned too, so we end up siding with No. 6’s enemies. 

When The Prisoner first aired in 1967, many people were baffled by it and some found the final episode so incomprehensible that Patrick McGoohan, who not only starred, but was also creator, executive producer, writer, and director of many episodes, had to leave the country.  Even at the age of eight I was surprised by this.  I don’t know what it was about The Prisoner, but something in it “clicked” with me and I had no trouble understanding the allegorical elements and the messages that McGoohan was trying to convey.  Indeed, the series became a major influence on my life.  I admired No. 6’s sang froid and powerful sense of identity and he was a major role model for me—too much of one, if you ask my wife.  He instilled a life-long hatred of tyranny in me, a suspicion of modern society, and the necessity of looking good in a tux.  Two out of three, I guess.

Also, being eight, I thought his Lotus Super Seven S II was the coolest car ever built and I tried very hard to imagine my push bike as an adequate substitute. 

I’m actually looking forward to the new series, which is quite a change from how I’d have welcomed the news a couple of years ago.  Until the revival of Doctor Who, I would have looked upon this with trepidation, but Russell Davies’ work in bringing the Doctor into the 21^st century while retaining the best of the old series has been a great reassurance that proper fantasy television can still be done.  Sky says that they’re taking a bold, new approach, which the viewers will be able to understand.  I guess they don’t want to leave the country after episode six.  It’ll be interesting to see what this means on the night.  The way I see it, there are three decent approaches to the remake:

• Update it.  Do a “reinvention” of the format for our times.  This is risky, as the Cold War is over and the premise is hard to fit in the context of the Islamofascist War.
• Do a straight remake.  Do the new series as a period piece set in the 1960s.  Also risky, as the sci-fi elements will have a very quaint feel that will deaden the bite.
• Carry on from the first series.  Acknowledge the original series as part of the show’s history, but what we are seeing is the Village, or a revived version, that has continued until today.  Our No. 6 is not the old No. 6, but a new character with the old number.

For my money, I’d go for the third option.  It not only would be an excuse for freshening things up while keeping the continuity intact, it would also open the door for a cameo by McGoohan as his old character.  A similar approach works with the new Doctor Who and it may keep the producers from getting a bit overambitious with the “reimagining,” which is another word for “kiss of death.”

But the big question on everyone’s lips is: Will there be brass bands and a giant white homicidal balloon that roars at people?  If the answer is yes, then the inner geek will be satisfied.

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